FM The blockchain space remains steaming hot in the face of a wave of unsettling events across the globe. While the economy continues its post-pandemic recovery and war rages in Ukraine, leading to sky-high oil prices and stuttering financial markets elsewhere, cryptocurrencies are finally living up to their promise as a store of value, with the value of most tokens remaining steady over the last few months.
That explains why there’s been no shortage of investor cash pouring into the crypto space amid all of these worrisome events and proves that not only is blockchain here to stay, but also that it’s still one of the hottest growth prospects for smart money investors.
Crypto startups enjoyed a solid month in February, bagging millions of dollars in fresh cash even as investors pulled back on their outlays elsewhere. Here are some of the most notable funding rounds from last month: AdaSwap
Yet more money in the DeFi space was raised by AdaSwap , which boasted some very prominent backers of its own, including the famed Israeli actress Gal Gadot and her film producer husband Jaraon Varsano.
AdaSwap’s $2.6 million raise was led by the angel investing platform iAngels, and also saw the participation of Shima Capital, Pluto Digital, GBV, and Stardust.
AdaSwap’s mission is to build the first functional DEX on the Cardano blockchain and it’s a very worthwhile goal. That’s because Cardano is one of the most popular blockchains of all, yet despite its cryptocurrency being ranked 9th in the world, it lags behind its peers in terms of its ecosystem. One of the difficulties developers face with Cardano is that its EUTXO-based blockchain is architecturally much closer to Bitcoin than Ethereum, meaning it’s very difficult to write smart contracts for the platform.
To get around this problem, AdaSwap has built its DEX on a Layer-2 protocol solution for Cardano, where it will bundle and process transactions. That will eliminate the difficulty of coding smart contracts and the long processing times that afflict exchanges such as SundaeSwap, AdaSwap explained.
The funds from the raise will also go towards building an NFT marketplace, which will sell curated collections from artists on the Cardano blockchain. AdaSwap is ultimately aiming to build an entire ecosystem of decentralized applications on the chain, including bridges that will make Cardano tokens interoperable with Ethereum, BSC, and Casper-based tokens.
“Current market competitors are focused on utilizing Cardano believers and fail to look towards other blockchains for attracting volume,” AdaSwap co-founder Itar Levy told Entrepreneur in an interview. “AdaSwap will launch as a cross-chain token to not only create a higher level of trade volume but then bring these cross-chain buyers over to Cardano with our great utilities and incentives. BitsCrunch
As well as DeFi and GameFi, there’s no shortage of investor capital being thrown at the NFT space either. One of the most exciting projects to attract money last month was BitsCrunch , an NFT analytics firm which secured $3.6 million from Animoca Brands, Coinbase Ventures, Crypto.com Capital and other investors.
BitsCrunch’s goal is to protect investors in the crypto space by providing them with the tools they need to spot fakes and other scams. To do this, it relies on artificial intelligence-powered tools to determine the fair price of NFTs. It can also spot whether an NFT is a forgery or a copy of a genuine asset, and also provide warnings on “ wash trading ”, which is a fraudulent technique employed by scammers to falsely inflate the value of NFTs.
It’s a desperately needed service. OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace of all, openly admitted last month that as many as 80% of NFTs using its minting tool were either plagiarized from other artists or spam. And although OpenSea claims to be able to spot most fakes and delete them from its platform, it’s apparent that some do sneak past its sensors, hence the need for tools such as what BitsCrunch offers.
In an interview with Cointelegraph last month, BitsCrunch CEO Vijay Pravin Maharajan said the platform supports NFTs on Ethereum, Polygon and Avalanche and that it will soon add support for other popular blockchains, including Solana, Polkadot and Algorand.
Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu said he was investing in BitsCrunch because it can help investors to make more informed decisions and contribute to “the safety and security of the emerging metaverse.” Dexalot
Perhaps the most notable round in the DeFi space involved Dexalot , which raised $7 million from Avalanche’s Blizzard Fund, with the participation of a number of Avalanche […]
source 5 Intriguing Crypto Startups That Raised Funding in February
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